05:26 GMT 8th November 2011
But for the future Nobel Peace Prize winner it offered the best of both worlds, an idyllic childhood still steeped in Kikuyu culture followed by a fIrst class education that would take her from convent school to university in the US.
When she returned to her homeland in the 1970s as a veterinary scientist, she found the area she had roamed in as a child much changed. 'The cows were so skinny, I could count their ribs .. . there was little grass or fodder for them to eat,' she recalls in her autobiography Unbowed.
'The people, too, looked undernourished and poor and the vegetation in their fIelds was scanty.' Some were even suffering from diseases associated with malnutrition. 'This was an eye opener for me since that is where I come from [the central region] and I know from personal experience that the central region was one of the most fertile in Kenya.'
Many farmers had converted most of their land to growing tea and coffee, cash crops occupying land previously used to grow food for people to eat, while forests had been cleared to make way for more plantations.
As a result women were feeding their families on processed foods that were less nutritious. Rivers were becoming silted up with topsoil drawn from areas that had been deforested and, in the absence of tree roots to bind the soil, there were also frequent landslides.
As befIts a daughter of the Anjiru, a clan associated with leadership, Maathai's immediate thought was 'something must be done'. The next one was 'why not plant trees?' And so was born the Greenbelt Movement that ambitiously aimed to plant one tree for every person in Kenya. Launched in 1977 to mark World Environmental Day, it made headline news when Maathai and fellow members of the National Council for Women of Kenya, planted seven trees in honour of historic community leaders in a park on the outskirts of Nairobi.
Maathai encouraged women to plant trees throughout the country. In the end, 2,000 women's groups and more than a thousand schools were active in the Greenbelt Movement, planting 45 million trees and learning how to manage their environment more effectively. In this way, Maathai reasons, they could also reclaim the dignity that was being stripped off them as quickly as their land.
Maathai's work won international recognition and if her story ended here one would have closed the book feeling suffIciently inspired. But of course it didn't. Many of the environmental abuses she was trying to combat were the result of government policy, particularly the sell off of public land, including precious forests, to Kenya's 'big men'. Planting trees was one thing planting seeds of change was another and Maathai found herself at increasing loggerheads with the establishment.
One of her biggest battles was against the government's decision in 1989 to erect a skyscraper in Nairobi's Uhuru Park, the capital's biggest open space. After making the campaign global, she was vilifIed in parliament as 'a crazy woman'. Later in an independence day speech, Moi suggested Maathai be a 'proper woman' in the African tradition and respect men and be quiet. Maathai ignored the advice and the project was eventually dropped.
Her memoir is simply told but provides a chilling snapshot of the twilight years of the Moi government, under attack at home and abroad but desperate to cling on to power. For daring to make a stand, Maathai was frequently beaten and detained, on one occasion charged with sedition and treason. The charges were dropped after the intervention of US politicians Al Gore and Edward Kennedy.
Mismanagement and corruption saw Kenya sliding further into crisis, with outbreaks of bloody ethnic clashes, which Maathai says was fomented by the government itself. The more she fought to expose what was going on, the more she became a target for violence and she was forced to go into hiding.
This is above all a human story in which Maathai's personal struggles are laid bare, including her very public divorce from her husband, the father of her three children, and the way she was routinely discriminated against because she was a woman. Armed with a great sense of justice, determination and downright fearlessness, she triumphed, becoming an MP in the 2002 elections that saw an end to Moi's 24-year rule. Two years later, she received the ultimate accolade when she received the Nobel Peace Prize for being 'a strong voice speaking for the best forces in Africa to promote peace and good living conditions'. She celebrated the news in the best way she knew - by planting a tree.
Unbowed: One women's story, by Wangari Maathai, is published by William Heinemann, London
no comments
